I Love the “Life” in Life Coaching

Photo © Yury Li-Toroptsov

Many professional coaches do not do life coaching, and the reason for this hesitation often lies in the fact that fields such as sports coaching or executive coaching tend to specialize in clearly defined domains like athletic performance, career advancement, while life coaching addresses something far broader, more diffuse, and harder to regulate, which is life itself in its complexity and ambiguity.

Life coaching does not benefit from the same level of institutional regulation or standardized credentialing as psychotherapy or organizational consulting, and because it sometimes overlaps with therapeutic concerns without being therapy, many professionals prefer to remain within the safety of their discipline in order to maintain their legitimacy and effectiveness in the eyes of clients, institutions, and peers.

This is not my case.

I enjoy doing life coaching, and I choose to call it life coaching without trying to rename it or reframe it in a way that would make it appear more acceptable to professional communities that often distrust holistic forms of accompaniment.

Life coaching emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s through the work of Thomas Leonard, who initially shifted away from financial planning toward helping psychologically stable clients organize their lives and pursue broader forms of fulfillment, which he first described as life planning and later formalized under the term personal coaching, placing emphasis on goal setting, accountability, and the development of human potential through structured dialogue.

The word coach itself derives from a sixteenth century Hungarian carriage known as a kocsi, which transported passengers from one place to another, and this metaphor later appeared in nineteenth century Oxford where tutors were described as carrying students through examinations, before entering the twentieth century world of sports as a figure who supports performance and development, and finally being adapted to describe a professional who accompanies individuals through personal transitions in life.

Life coaching gained visibility around the year 2000 as a practice that encompassed multiple domains such as career, relationships, health, and creativity, offering a form of accompaniment that addressed everyday existence in a holistic manner rather than focusing on a single area of performance or pathology.

This holistic orientation is precisely what interests me.

The way I understand life coaching is as a professionally maintained space that remains free from judgement and within which a client is able to reflect on the challenges that require attention, while also moving toward decisions and actions that align more closely with their values and aspirations.

Although this work is not therapy, the fact that I am an analyst in training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich means that I do not exclude analytic perspectives from my coaching practice when they prove relevant, and psychodynamic understanding sometimes becomes one of the tools available to us during the process.

Another such tool is systemic coaching based on the Palo Alto approach, which encourages systemic thinking, focuses on communication patterns, orients itself toward problem solving, avoids pathologizing the client, and relies on collaboration between coach and client to produce change within relational systems.

Creativity and artistic expression also play a significant role in my way of working, particularly through the use of image analysis, spontaneous drawing, and photography, which often allow access to layers of the psyche that remain unavailable to verbal reasoning alone.

In a culture that increasingly privileges literal interpretation at the expense of symbolic thought, many individuals struggle to make sense of their experience because they lack the symbolic frameworks through which meaning can emerge, and the development of symbolic thinking therefore becomes an important aspect of the coaching process.

For example, a client who initially described her professional dilemma as a binary choice between staying in her current role or leaving it altogether began to shift her perspective after producing a spontaneous drawing of a submerged structure with a narrow staircase leading upward, which allowed her to reconceive her situation not as a corridor with two doors but as a movement between psychological depth and elevation, thereby opening a range of possibilities that had previously remained invisible to her.

Transformation in this case did not begin with advice or planning but with the activation of a symbolic level of experience that altered how the situation was perceived.

There is also another factor that influences the outcome of coaching more strongly than any method or technique, and this factor is the relationship itself.

Trust between coach and client creates the conditions within which reflection becomes possible and action becomes sustainable, and it is this relational chemistry that often allows for profound and lasting transformation to take place within the space that the coach holds throughout the process.

Contemporary life has created a growing need for forms of accompaniment that attend not only to technical skills and measurable performance but also to deeper psychological and symbolic dimensions of human experience, and it is within this context that the type of life coaching I practice finds its relevance.

I remain attached to the word life in life coaching because it acknowledges the full scope of what clients bring into the room and the breadth of what they seek to transform.